Has CBeebies began to gentrify?
Hello, my name is Delaney Lamb, I study the history of media and communications, and I hate Go Jetters, Numberblocks, Hey Duggee, Dora the Explorer, Woolly and Tig, Kit and Pup, Alphablocks, Get Well Soon, My Pet and Me, Bitz and Bob, and Dodge T. Dog. Personally, I don’t try to eliminate screen time. I limit it, and I understand it’s dangers, but I do set my siblings in front of the TV sometimes, and part of the reason for that is CBeebies. I grew up on CBeebies. CBeebies, CBBC, and comic books taught me to read. When CBeebies was capturing my brother Jacob's interest, I had no problem setting him down in front of the TV to watch “Beebies.” That said, I had an issue—I, as I said before, hate Modern CBeebies. At six years old, Dodge T. Dog is half the age of Caillou, Hey Duggee only teaches kids how to run around and be corny, Woolly and Tig does poorly at teaching emotions and most of it is just a bratty girl and a chatty spider, Kids need to learn how to engineer, but not the ways that Bitz and Bob teaches inventing. But if he was going to love Modern CBeebies anyway, I was at least going to track down old CBeebies, to start him out with. What I discovered was a small community of Youtubers (who exist in a legal gray zone, to be generous) who track down old VHS tapes of CBeebies, digitize them, and upload and share them. There are occasional takedown notices etc, but they are a small enough community and I doubt they are worth anyone pursuing. So my brother and I started watching continuity and shows from before 2007 or so. Before the ascension of Modern CBeebies. Cumulatively, we have easily watched between fifty and a hundred hours of vintage CBeebies'' in the last year. We also have Xfinity and Comcast, both of which have shows that aired between 2009 and today. So eventually I gave up and started watching more recent episodes as well. And what I saw was that my old television destination was gone. My immediate impression was akin to seeing the impact of gentrification transform a beloved pre-school channel you once knew. We’ve all experienced this at one time or another. You used to live or work or spend lots of time somewhere, and you come back years later, only to find it transformed to the point where it’s unrecognizable. Everything seemed cleaner, somehow. They have free wifi in the CBeebies House now!—but many local fixtures have been replaced with hipper, newer options. Sometimes there’s a pet hamster, and there’s a loft bed. They air a few old programmes, but most of them are cheesy and don't have an educational value at all! I don't want 64 Zoo Lane (series 3 & 4), Teletubbies (reboot), and Something Special (We're all Friends) on my TV for 13 bloody hours a day! You might see an occasional familiar face, but the folks you knew from way back don’t present there anymore. The demographics have shifted. I wanted to figure out what had happened to the channel. Why it was so different. It had to be more complex than the simple passage of time. And because I’m a historian of media and my mind just works this way, I began a seriously deep dive into the history of CBeebies. Because that’s what you get trained to do, when you do a PhD. You learn to obsess, to go down rabbit holes, to dedicate months of research to questions that other people would just shrug and forget about. The more I researched the network's history and evolution, the more shows I watched and the more I learned what was happening behind the scenes, the more I had my initial impression confirmed—CBeebies has, in fact, been almost literally gentrified. Over the years, the show has responded to economic pressures much the same way many cities have– by trying to “clean up” the chnanel, force out minority communities, and thereby raise the metaphorical real estate values. CBeebies may be populated by yellow bugs, but there is no single “evil developer” character to be blamed for the gentrification of '''Beebies. Rather, it can be understood as a series of rational decisions based on audience response and funding. the initial germ of CBeebies can be found at lunch one day at the University of Manchester. ''Broom Cupboard/'Jungle Run ''presenter Chris Jarvis, puppeteer and Baby Einstein cheif exec Sue Monroe, Broom Cupboard producer Sidney Sloane, and brothers Andy and John Day have recently took classes about early childhood teaching so that they could become teachers. Jarvis and Sloane have also learned about Children's television from BBC and iTV. They had TV shows like ''Play School ''and ''Blue Peter ''screened for their students each day when they were teaching pre-school. Monroe and fellow student Liam Dolan (from CBBC on Choice) phoned friend Pui Fan Lee (who voiced Po in the original run of ''Teletubbies). Jarvis made a deal with the BBC to launch a digital children's channel without cable, and CBeebies was launched as a Sky service on September 26th, 2001. In response, the BBC itself launched a CBBC sister channel for older kids. Both channels launched on February 11th, 2002 alongside their companion websites. Each CBeebies show was test screened before airing on television. They usually went to air because Children usually responded to their education-based curriculum. BBC usually reflected on the show's curriculum whenever merchandise was sold. The shows were so popular with their teachings that they were given Christmas specials, apps, and more than 2 series. The presenters lived in a colourful set that looked like a city apartment. It was filled with everyday props to capture viewers' attentions. From the launch day, Chris (Caucasian) and Pui (Asian) were the emotional center of introducing the programmes, serving as surrogate parents. They owned Ellie, the lift of the CBeebies apartment, and Beebie and Bracken, the two pet rabbits, and served as presenters and educators to the children who visited the apartment or just waiting for their favourites to come on the telly. The presenting crew expanded and took on a diverse community. 2003 introduced the black Nicole Davis. 2006 introduced Emma Fan Lee, Pui's then-14 year old cousin. CBeebies would then later diversify in multiple interesting ways, including the addition of one-armed Cerrie Burnell, the Welsh writer/director Alex Winters, and the makaton actor Justin Fletcher. There was even some controversy among the shows, too. CBeebies aired the lost episode of Teletubbies. The BBC received more than 200 complaints, which made them ending up scrapping the show for 3 months straight. The new millennium has not been especially kind to television, generally. Consumers have expanding media options with the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets. With this proliferation of options, broadcasters have had to redefine “success.” Whereas a prime-time show would need at least a 30% market share during the network era to be considered successful, the threshold has dropped below 10%, according to the textbook Media and Culture. An analysis by TRAC Media Services showed that viewership had declined from 2010 to early 2014 for all children’s networks except Sprout, which was essentially stable in last place. I don’t have information about CBeebies' numbers in particular, but it seems reasonable to assume that during the same period, the show’s viewership likely suffered the same decline as the website did. Seemingly trying to fight these broader trends, BBC commissioned newer, fresher content to the channel and its counterpart radio service. These shows tended to skew younger than the classic shows. As Dora, Octonauts, Hey Duggee, Go Jetters, Topsy and Tim, and Moon and Me gained more screen time, older presenters appeared less. Orienting the newer shows toward a younger audience than the classic shows has also had the seemingly unintended consequence of making the presenters introduce shows and read birthday cards even more broadly than the original presenters did. In the current pres, Sam Michaels and Nisha Anil often seem to be mirroring the immature house style of the Disney Channel, Dan Schneider's modern day Nick shows, or even the modern Cartoon Network. The programmer was—from 2002—phenomenally popular. DVDs, books, records, and later videotapes all provided a lucrative source of income to supplement what dwindling funding could not. Then, in 2006, Tiny Pop and Cartoonito happened, Both channels started eating into CBeebies' ratings and their ancillary merchandise dollars. This channel, which had always been steered by both evidence-based testing and a crew with a shared vision for what the programmes should be, began to lose its institutional memory. The keepers of that oh-so-important vision started to move on, replaced with a new generation. And instead of being steered by data and vision, the network slowly came see data collection as a way to combat dropping ratings. We see the rise of cable and Internet, of streaming video online and health organizations increasingly advising no television for children under five. Ratings slipped further, as they did across television generally. The broadcaster that CBeebies has become is, as I said before, gentrified. It has literally been cleaned up—the original set was (unheard of for the time) a “colourful" set, with objects that little ones see every day. The set used today lacks the signs of use, wear, and damage. It uses more brightly colored paint, because these have proven more eye catching to young children. It is also much less of a recognizable, organic-feeling everyday community. The presenting cast in the early years felt like a family —it was a mix of Asians, African Americans like Sid (a dance teacher), and white creatives like Sue (a voice coach). The contemporary presenters feel very much symbolically multicultural—a “one from each column” approach—while the majority of screen time goes to the shows, especially to their newer characters who are coded younger, as the show’s core audience is now much younger. (It is also worth noting that BBC has almost never created merchandise that centered on the human cast members. I always wanted a Pui action figure. Shows can be marketed, programmes can be sold.) …And all of this makes me sad, not just because of nostalgia, but because it means that the new Cbeebies looks a lot less like the neighborhood my family is raising my brother in. There was a superabundance of hope on CBeebies. And letters, numbers, shapes, colours, emotions, manners, opposites, seasons, human body, time, weather, going green, and bedtime. And I want Jacob to be able to watch tapes of CBeebies where he can see a house that looks like the one he is growing up in: where the presenters look like our neighbours. And thanks to Youtube video archivists, he can. The fashions are a bit dated, a few of the technological references are pretty outmoded, but at the end of the day, CBeebies has aged very well. The lessons, from the alphabet and numbers to seasons, sharing, opposites—these things are timeless. He loves In the Night Garden..., sure, and we both enjoy the new “CBeebies on the Job” segments. But that in no way detracts from her enjoyment of Classic CBeebies. She doesn’t care about the lower video fidelity or the fact that some of the old episodes are incomplete. And I guess that’s the next best thing. But I have to ask myself — could BBC maybe do better? But what if it made the 17 years of quality educational programming more widely available? Access has to be an important part of the archival mission, along with collection and preservation. BBC has been the beneficiary of so much public and charitable funding. What if it, AAPB and Disney, along with other corporate partners, made most of the shows freely accessible to all? Some years definitely couldn’t be included. BBC and Disney both want rights to the recent years, and it seems that contracts with Amazon and Hulu would likely preclude anything after the year 2013. But that still leaves 10 years of CBeebies, and I would argue that’s the really good stuff. What if BBC worked with Disney to create a free video platform — not unlike Disney+ or Netflix — that let you watch the first 10 years of CBeebies, from 2002 to 2012? And what if they further were able to secure full or even partial rights on some of their many international channels (Latin America, United States, Australia, Canada, Asia, Poland, and South Africa)? Suddenly you would have a multilingual one-stop CBeebies shop. BBC and Abbey Home Media tried to capitalize on these early episodes during by re-releasing classic CBeebies videos on DVD, but their partnership with Noggin was dissolved. Similarly, they have packaged DVDs of old shows, but we seem to have entered an age of streaming for the foreseeable future. With no obvious plans to capitalize on the back catalog, why not make it freely available for all to stream? It might help transform the bad optics of partnering with Disney — no matter how commercially necessary that was — and the bandwidth it would require could easily be underwritten by corporate, tax-deductible giving. You can see how pre-schoolers are using touchscreen and tablets - they all love the online offering but it's still, nearly always, the characters and stories that they first see on television that takes them to those other areas. I know I still am. And so is my brother.Category:Stories